The Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism (ICSZ) denounces the U.S. House Education and Workforce Committee’s (HEWC) attacks on psychologists who oppose genocide and racism.

The Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism (ICSZ) denounces the U.S. House Education and Workforce Committee’s (HEWC) attacks on psychologists who oppose genocide and racism. Drawn from the tired Project Esther playbook, the HEWC “report,” Antisemitism at the American Psychological Association aims to naturalize the dehumanization of Arab and SWANA people by waging a war strategy against “organizations, funds, access, communications, platforms, and people” that have spoken out against the Zionist genocide of the Palestinian people. By cynically equating criticism of Zionism with antisemitism and ideologically inverting the “oppressor/oppressed” paradigm they obsessively reference, these racist attacks not only legitimize the destruction of Palestinian life but also run alongside HEWC attacks on trans/queer and Black people, and its erasure of Jews who reject racial supremacism. By demonizing the field’s most ethical practitioners and attempting to coerce alignment with the very institutional forces responsible for the mass slaughter of the Palestinian people, HEWC aims to coopt psychology for the racist, genocidal aims of the MAGA movement. Its goal is transparent: transforming the field of psychology into a tool of repressive power, neutralized of any ethical commitments and wielded as a bludgeon for state propaganda and violence.

ICSZ rejects HEWC’s racist attacks on AMENA-Psy and its efforts to renew attacks on Dr. Lara Sheehi.

HEWC has reliably served as the attack dog of MAGA demolition strategy, and any report or hearing that it produces should be understood as a smash-and-grab tool of a white supremacist culture war that has left our universities, institutions, and communities in ruins. In HEWC’s panicked effort to beat back young peoples’ political imaginings of a better world, its chairs Tim Walberg (R-MI) and Virginia Foxx (R-NC) have embraced Red Scare legislation requiring that schools teach anticommunism as U.S. doctrine. Walberg and Foxx have led legislative efforts to prevent teaching about racism, prevent universities from trying to become antiracist/equitable institutions, strip trans people of rights and humanity, and use funding threats to prevent university communities from boycotting Israel/genocide. When scholars debunked and rejected the “IHRA definition of antisemitism,” they sought to impose it anyway through policing and the sheer application of authoritarian state power. The pretense of concern about antisemitism is a core HEWC tactic.

HEWC’s targeting of APA is a strategy of Zionism and the broader fascism rising in the United States. Their military and counterinsurgency strategy lean heavily on psychology. Psychologists who resist, refuse, and discredit them, and who defend vulnerable populations against fascism, become HEWC’s targets. HEWC’s attacks on AMENA-Psy, whose leader helped APA resist racist demands – and against Dr. Lara Sheehi, whose scholarship on resisting racist and Zionist psychological tactics has reached deep into public culture – are clearly bids to coopt psychology and psychologists in the service of MAGA projects. The HEWC report reads as a counterintelligence document produced against an enemy subject, one that surveils APA’s internal correspondence and its public statements in an effort to strip the organizational body of any resistance to fascist power. Notably, it targets a session at the 2024 APA National Conference that featured a session featuring doctoral students in the field who courageously spoke out against the use of psyop tactics against the 2024 student encampments and student practices of community care and mutual aid and their commitment to political education. Through a psyops maneuver, it renames the Gaza solidarity encampments in which students across the United States came together to resist U.S. and their own university complicity in Zionist genocide, “anti-Israel university encampments.”

Following the anti-education blueprint of Project 2025 and Project Esther, HEWC and Zionist institutions together have attacked scholarly and scientific fields through their professional associations. Their aim is to seize the accrediting power of those organizations, so that their opponents cannot be credentialed as psychologists. Spurious claims of antisemitism are the route for this seizure. Zionist institutions have seeded the appearance of Jewish exclusion by fostering right-wing Jewish affinity groups within associations who misrepresent opposition to their demands as antisemitism. In APA, the Zionist affinity group made the preposterous claim that Jewish psychologists are marginalized within the field. They demanded to be seated on a council of affinity groups of BIPOC psychologists, and insisted that the Jewish anti-Zionist affinity group should be ignored. Since Zionist attacks on APA have largely failed, HEWC has followed up with a sensationalized, cherry-picked “report” that aims to lend Congressional weight to those preposterous claims.